And Ulla said, "Maybe Mother Rusch had an organ, if only one with a single manual, maybe in Saint Bridget's or possibly in the convent chapel." Whereupon she dropped her knitting, moved over on the bench, pressed buttons, manipu-
lated levers, pulled all the stops, and, playing with both hands and feet, made the organ literally thunder. Without regard for the struggling preacher down below and his interminable outpourings, she gave me a demonstration of the Klug Hymnal and its importance for the development of sixteenth-century music, at the same time letting-as Mother Rusch had done beneath her Catholic veil-her blaring, jubilant voice ring out with Luther's translations and Luther's original hymns. First: "With peace and joy I came." Then: "As we journey through this life." Then: "Salvation unto us is come." And finally, in the old setting, every verse of "A Mighty Fortress is our God," down to "And the Word shall stand forever…"
By that time Ulla's jubilation had emptied the church, for it was more than either the latter-day Hegge or his faithful could bear. After a frightened "Amen" and a hurried blessing, the pastor, followed by his ladies in their chamberpot hats, hurried out into the cold December air.
Oh, bliss of empty churches! For a short hour Ulla Witz-laff played the organ and sang for me alone. With musical examples she showed how Abbess Rusch and her Brigittine nuns had been Catholic on the one hand and devoutly Lutheran on the other. While she was at it, she gave me a bit of elementary instruction in liturgy and hymnology.
When, after a concluding "Come, Holy Ghost," the organ breathed its last, the organist threw her arms around me. I wanted to respond right there on the narrow organ bench, but Ulla, perhaps in memory of Mother Rusch's stable-warm box bed, said, "Save it for later. We might as well be comfortable."
As it is written, we were one flesh. And we laughed and laughed over the sixteenth-century Hegge and the latter-day Hegge. And afterward Ulla served me leftover lentils and island stories with the Flounder out of the fairy tale swimming through them.
The cook kisses
When she opens her mouth that would sooner hum than sing
and shapes it into a funnel for sticky porridge, mealy
dumplings, or with teeth created for this very purpose she bites off a chunk of tender sheep's neck or a goose's left breast and passes it on — rolled in her spittle— to me with a thrust of her tongue.
Stringy meat prechewed.
Or if too tough, run through the grinder.
Her kiss is food.
So trout cheeks, olives,
nuts, the kernels of plum pits she
has cracked with her molars,
black bread afloat in beer,
a peppercorn intact
and crumbled cheese—
with a kiss she shares them all.
Broken in health, propped on cushions,
ravaged by fever, disgust, and thoughts,
I was revived (time and again) by her kisses,
which never came empty-handed and were never just kisses.
And I gave back
oysters, calves' brains, chicken hearts, bacon.
Once we ate a pike with our fingers, I hers, she mine. Once we exchanged squabs down to the delicate little bones.
Once (and time and again) we kissed each other full of beans. Once, after always the same quarrel (because I'd drunk up the rent money), a radish reconciled us after a turnip estrangement. And once we had fun with the caraway seeds in the sauerkraut, and kept exchanging them, hungry for more.
When Agnes the cook
kissed Opitz the dying poet,
he took a little asparagus tip with him on his last journey.
The Fourth Month
Inspection of feces
In the fourth month of her pregnancy (and therefore suddenly wild about hazelnuts), Ilsebill, who doesn't want to have been my kitchenmaid, whose thinking is strictly rectilinear, and who could easily be one of the Flounder's accusers, lost an upper-right molar made valuable by a gold crown and, taking fright as if a male toad were creeping up on her, swallowed it. All she spat out was the shell of the hazelnut, which, irony of ironies, had been empty.
"Well?" I said next morning. "Did you look for it? It's gold, after all."
But she refused to inspect her morning stools, let alone prod them with a washable fork. And I was forbidden to root around in her "excrement," as she contemptuously
called it.
"That's because you were brought up unwisely and too well," I said. For our fecal matter should be important to us and not repel us. It's not a foreign body. It has our
warmth. Nowadays it's being described again in books, shown in films, and painted in still lifes. It had been forgotten, that's all. Because as far as I can think back and look behind me, all the cooks (inside me) have inspected their feces and — in all my time-phases — mine as well. I was always under strict supervision.
During her years as an abbess, for instance, Fat Gret made all the novices bring her their chamber pots, and every kitchen boy who came to her for employment had first to demonstrate his fitnesss by showing healthy stools.
And even when, as Albrecht the swordmaker, I was plagued with daily Lenten fare, I was subjected to ex posteriori inspections. So unyieldingly fanatical was my wife and meatless cook, Dorothea, about her ascetic way of life that, not content with setting a meatless and fatless table, she checked on my intake at other people's tables by poking through my feces for undigested bits of sinew or traces of bacon rind or tripe fiber, and compared my deposit with her own High Gothic and penitential stools, which were always dry and transcendental in their pallor, whereas I had sinned — at guild banquets, when suckling pigs stuffed with milky millet were carved for the smiths and swordmakers; or when, sometimes in the woods and sometimes at the lodge of the stonemasons then working on Saint Peter's in the Outer City, I cooked in secret with my friend Lud the wood carver: sheep's kidneys and fat sheep's tails grilled over an open fire. Nothing could be concealed from Dorothea. Many a time I gave myself away by swallowing cartilage or small bones, which came out the other end intact.
And when I was General Rapp, Napoleon's governor of the Republic of Danzig, it was the cook Sophie Rotzoll who, because I had disparaged her mushroom dishes as indigestible, spread my shit on a silver platter and served it up to me. I had a soldier's sense of humor; I put up with her impudence. And she was right: not a shred of mushroom skin, not a single mushroom worm to be seen. My palate grew keener and keener, and soon I was calling morels, milk caps, and egg mushrooms delicate. My taste developed to the point where I wouldn't even forgo the tasty though sandy Polish green agaric, although the sand would have shown up in my gubernatorial stools.
But what my last Napoleonic shit would have looked like if I had partaken of the special mushrooms Sophie added to her stuffed calf's head — which dispatched six of my guests, officers all, including three Polish officers and one officer from the Rhenish Confederation, into the other world — I hardly dare imagine, though the shattering effect of the poisonous sulfur tuft is well known.
All my cooks, I say, have inspected feces, read the future in feces, and in prehistoric times even carried on a pagan dialogue with fecal matter. Wigga, for instance, examining the still-steaming shitpile of a Gothic captain who had been so ill-mannered as to relieve himself in the immediate vicinity of our Wicker Bastion settlement, read the inexorable destiny of the Goths, who were soon to embark on their migration. In our Old Pomorshian tongue (the precursor of present-day Kashubian), she oracled their division into Ostrogoths and Visigoths, into luminous Goths and sublime Goths: Ermanaric and the Huns, Alaric in Rome. How Beli-sarius would take King Vitiges prisoner. The Battle of Chalons. And so on and so on. .